Vodacom Business enhances cyber resilience

Issue 5 2020 Information Security

The global cybercrime pandemic triggered by COVID-19 may be here to stay, making it critical for businesses to ensure they are protected. News reports of the recent local attack on a critical healthcare organisation earlier this month indicates that South African businesses are not exempt, with South Africa seeing a 33% increase in the volume of cyber-attacks since March.

To continue to support and protect customers, Vodacom Business has partnered with Cloudflare to provide businesses of all sizes, faster, more secure and reliable website services.

Fast becoming a common type of cyberattack is a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack. DDoS attacks target websites and online services with the goal of overwhelming them with more traffic than the server or network can accommodate. This ultimately renders the website or service inoperable, leading to revenue loss, operational expenses and more importantly damage to a company’s brand.

Digital businesses depend on constant, uninterrupted connectivity. Network and web services availability is crucial to ensuring customer satisfaction, trust and confidence in a brand or business. With new attacks varying in size, duration and persistence, DDoS protection has become an essential part of every business and organisation’s online presence.

“As a leading supplier of telecommunications, infrastructure and enterprise software in South Africa, Vodacom Business’s partnership with Cloudflare ensures that our customers have the best products and solutions available to protect them from today’s increasingly sophisticated online threats,” says Kabelo Makwane, managing executive for Cloud, Hosting and Security at Vodacom Business. “Now is not the time to let your guard down. With some businesses going back to their offices but many others still operating via remote working, cyber criminals are gearing up to further attack businesses as they adopt a hybrid model between their corporate network and remote set up.”

Cloudflare offers a diverse set of security, performance, and reliability products that use machine learning to provide actionable and timely insights that help secure and accelerate websites and other Internet properties. These include:

• Proactively defending against cyberattacks.

• Providing insights from traffic to a single Internet property that can be applied across Cloudflare’s entire global network to quickly prevent potential cyberattacks.

• Blocking malicious traffic by classifying bad traffic using the source IP.

• Improving performance by routing traffic intelligently.

• Automatic updates to WAF for protecting against new application attacks.

The partnership with Cloudflare will allow Vodacom Business to offer DDoS protection and traffic acceleration for all network infrastructure — whether on-premise, cloud-hosted, or in a hybrid environment. Now more than ever, business networks need to remain secure, fast, and reliable. Cloudflare’s network offers the scale and performance that helps organisations deliver a superior application experience while keeping their environments secure. 

“This solution is vital for Internet applications such as websites that collect users’ personal details and require additional security and can be applied by financial institutions, hospitals and any other businesses to ensure their customers’ personal information remains secure,” says Makwane.

No business is exempt from the many risks of cybercrimes, including financial loss, disruption in operations and damage to the business reputation. Vodacom Business continues to provide security products and services to businesses of all sizes, leveraging skilled resources and cutting-edge technology to secure IT systems and networks.




Share this article:
Share via emailShare via LinkedInPrint this page



Further reading:

What are MFA fatigue attacks, and how can they be prevented?
Information Security
Multifactor authentication is a security measure that requires users to provide a second form of verification before they can log into a corporate network. It has long been considered essential for keeping fraudsters out. However, cybercriminals have been discovering clever ways to bypass it.

Read more...
SA's cybersecurity risks to watch
Information Security
The persistent myth is that cybercrime only targets the biggest companies and economies, but cybercriminals are not bound by geography, and rapidly digitising economies lure them in large numbers.

Read more...
Cyber insurance a key component in cyber defence strategies
Information Security
[Sponsored] Cyber insurance has become a key part of South African organisations’ risk reduction strategies, driven by the need for additional financial protection and contingency plans in the event of a cyber incident.

Read more...
Deception technology crucial to unmasking data theft
Information Security Security Services & Risk Management
The ‘silent theft’ of data is an increasingly prevalent cyber threat to businesses, driving the ongoing leakage of personal information in the public domain through undetected attacks that cannot even be policed by data privacy legislation.

Read more...
Data security and privacy in global mobility
Security Services & Risk Management Information Security
Data security and privacy in today’s interconnected world is of paramount importance. In the realm of global mobility, where individuals and organisations traverse borders for various reasons, safeguarding sensitive information becomes an even more critical imperative.

Read more...
Sophos celebrates partners and cybersecurity innovation at annual conference
News & Events Information Security
[Sponsored] Sun City hosted Sophos' annual partner event this year, which took place from 12 to 14 March. Sophos’ South African cybersecurity distributors and resellers gathered for an engaging two-day conference.

Read more...
The CIPC hack has potentially serious consequences
Editor's Choice Information Security
A cyber breach at the South African Companies and Intellectual Property Commission (CIPC) has put millions of companies at risk. The organisation holds a vast database of registration details, including sensitive data like ID numbers, addresses, and contact information.

Read more...
Navigating South Africa's cybersecurity regulations
Sophos Information Security Infrastructure
[Sponsored] Data privacy and compliance are not just buzzwords; they are essential components of a robust cybersecurity strategy that cannot be ignored. Understanding and adhering to local data protection laws and regulations becomes paramount.

Read more...
AI augmentation in security software and the resistance to IT
Security Services & Risk Management Information Security
The integration of AI technology into security software has been met with resistance. In this, the first in a series of two articles, Paul Meyer explores the challenges and obstacles that must be overcome to empower AI-enabled, human-centric decision-making.

Read more...
Milestone Systems joins CVE programme
Milestone Systems News & Events Information Security
Milestone Systems has partnered with the Common Vulnerability and Exposures (CVE) Programme as a CVE Numbering Authority (CNA), to assist the programme to find, describe, and catalogue known cybersecurity issues.

Read more...